Say Hello to Tom

Tue Jan 22 21:20:12 2013

We, at Castle Shadowcat, would like to introduce you to Tom our latest staff acquisition. Tom joins us as a special intern at Shadowcat, for a number of years we have been stating that the best way to bring more life into Perl is to get people who are not fully Perl programmers, and in fact may not be programmers at all. Not to always aim for the Computer Science graduates, or those fluent in another language, but to look for people whose natural passions point them as having the right mindset to learn and to place them in a stimulating environment to learn and let them develop and shape as they find natural.

Tom hard at work at Castle Shadowcat

It is important to note that an affiliation with programming, or the basics of logic are always an advantage but a well administered aptitude test can determine the right mindset to attempt a trial from anyone.

For this year, with the impetus provided by Shadowcat's newest Lancastrian recruit Ian Norton, we went searching for just such a person. We had discussed it previously but had never acted upon it since 2006 when we last had a summer intern.

We found Tom, he is a hardware hacker most commonly associated with HackMan and the Manchester Hack Space. Tom already had some programming ability but was more of a hardware hacker. What he shows, however, is a great willingness to learn and this said to us that we should give him some attention.

Tom will be with us a few days a month as he trials learning new skills and attempts to pick up Perl and other associated technologies. What he will also be trailing is whether he has the ability to work in an intensive environment on complex projects.

To begin we will have Tom doing a number of internal tasks and slowly increase the complexity. but he doesn't make the tea or fetch the pork-Friday foodstuffs (we leave that job to the Managing Director). Tom started by installing a number of code environments and setting up his system to create a new project based in Perl/Android/iOS with some HTML5/CSS/Javascript, it should also involve elements such as RSS/XML and maybe JSON. We have a second project based in Perl that is already in a private test environment that he will also be working on so that he can learn feature adding and code refactoring of an existing Perl project.

At Shadowcat we have a belief, you push the person off the cliff and expect them to scream if they can't quickly learn how to fly. Thus far he has whimpered a little, and made a few face shaped dents in his desk, but his screams are relatively quiet.